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Well, actually some people do care, for different reasons. If apple was more open then it would appeal much more to these people. Sometimes it is even just a p
by freehorse 4y ago
Well, actually some people do care, for different reasons. If apple was more open then it would appeal much more to these people.
Sometimes it is even just a practical issue: having as low level control as possible can increase performance in certain aspects, for example in latency related tasks, that can be important in certain applications. This does not make everything else useless, but there are definitely tasks for which I choose an AMD gpu over an NVIDIA gpu (or apple silicon) just because of the open source drivers in linux.
- zer0zzz 4y agoA lot of this control and insight into the µarch is gleaned by the public not from the hardware company's released drivers or docs but through exactly this sort of reversing. See Ager's website as an example. You could also take this to the extreme, as Stallman used to do with his OLPC where he deleted the wifi blob to only use lan because it wasn't free enough. If you have to wait for hardware company's to build free and open drivers and open hardware docs and open firmwares to use linux well im afraid your options are basically some X220 with a Open rom bios reimage. For now, Apple's arm64 silicon is the most compelling option for anyone that wants to develop on the architecture locally. It's the same way as how i386 was the most compelling option for anyone that wanted to run a free unix at home in 1991. It just does not matter that Apple hasn't done a dump of all their drivers and hardware docs because it is all we have and the hardware is damn good at that too.